Nicolai Krejberg Knudsen

I'm currently a Carlsberg Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College and an Associate Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. I earned my PhD from Aarhus University in 2019.

I work primarily on issues in phenomenology, social ontology, and practical philosophy. In general, my work focuses on the relation between human nature and sociality. I try to answer questions like: What enables individuals to constitute a group, and what does this tell us about the fundamental nature of the human being? How is moral agency transformed in communities? Can we ascribe responsibility to groups and not only individuals?

You can reach me at nicolai.knudsen@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Academic News

• New Grant: I'm happy to announce that I have received a Carlsberg Reintegration Fellowship for my project: "Reactive Attitudes and Group Evaluation: The Role of Emotion in Group Responsibility." I will start the project in September 2022 at Aarhus University.

• New Article: "Shared Action: An Existential Phenomenological Approach" has been published by Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. It's Open Access!

Current research

I currently work on two projects:

My first research project is on Heidegger’s social ontology. This project aims to rectify the popular conception that Heidegger had nothing substantial to say about human coexistence, let alone anything of lasting value. I do so by (i) reconstructing a coherent account of Heidegger’s social ontology as it appears in his published texts, lecture courses, and notebooks and (ii) showing how Heideggerian insights contribute to ongoing discussions on the nature of social cognition, collective intentionality, and social normativity. My book, Heidegger's Social Ontology: The Phenomenology of Self, World, and Others, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and will appear in 2022.

My second research project develops a phenomenological approach to group responsibility. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the way agency, intersubjectivity, and ethical demands play together in making us morally responsible for doing things that vastly exceed what we can do as individuals. In contrast to those accounts of group responsibility that take their points of departure in a preconceived and robust account of group agency, I take my point of departure in our group-directed moral emotions—what I, alluding to Strawson, call our group-directed reactive attitudes. To name a few examples, we resent Amazon for mistreating its workers, we are ashamed of our nation’s colonial past, and we are outraged that Neo-Nazis vandalise Jewish graveyards. My suggestion is that a close examination of the phenomenology of these group-directed reactive attitudes—that is, their intentional, intersubjective, and emotional structure—will yield a more exhaustive and detailed account of when it is appropriate to hold a group morally responsible for its actions or inactions. This research is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation (here and here).